Social Technologies — all those different tools we talk about as ‘social media’ — are creating the opportunity for
a social change trifecta.

Social technologies are making it possible for us to transform how individuals, organizations and economics interact with each other, in ways that can help all three thrive.

Social technologies make rich, complex, widespread, accessible communication possible. That’s exactly the kind of communication we need to really free ourselves of the constraints of previous models of organizing and working together.

We often forget that the constraints we pushing up against now, constraints like disengagement, organizational silos, and competition without cooperation, all result from ‘obstructed’ communication.

When communication is obstructed, people and organizations have unequal access to the knowledge, the allies and the influence they need to make sure they thrive.

Individuals can’t share themselves fully, organizations can’t coordinate effectively, and commercial communities can’t negotiate fairly because we can’t get everyone to the table, get everyone talking, and get everyone listening well enough to act in ways that benefit all.

Social Technologies create the opportunity for change at all three levels of productive participation.

• At the Individual level, social technologies give us tools for self-expression, self-affirmation, voice and agency. They give us places to participate and actual things to do that can make a difference.

• At the Organizational level, social technologies connect us and coordinate us through communication networks and locations. They let us find the information and the colleagues we need, when we need them. They let us share resources so that we work more efficiently, and share ideas so that we work more effectively. They let us collaborate to pursue shared purpose.

• At the Economic level, social technologies help organizations rethink their relationships with their stakeholders. They let organizations align and negotiate with stakeholders across both similarities and differences.

Social technologies make it possible for organizations to connect with other organizations and actors to create communities that surpass the functionality of markets.  These communities of commerce can create new types of economic opportunity for organizations large and small, because they offer different terms for conducting commerce. These communities have the social and technical structures to let us distribute the total value generated by our interdependent work in a way that is more fair.

Social Technologies work because they subvert and circumvent the kinds of power dynamics that organizations depended on when communication was more constrained.

Social Technologies Make Democratic Participation Possible

These technologies can make real the dream of democratic participation by individuals in organizations, of democracy as a guiding process in organizations, and of democratic negation within the economy for a more just distribution of net value.

A bonus opportunity is that social technologies make it possible for changes at any level to stimulate, support and power change at other levels. By design, social technologies integrate individual communication with group communication with stakeholder communication. Shift one level of communication and you nudge them all.

For example, digital collaborative work systems organize colleagues around shared goals and shared purpose while simultaneously making it possible for individuals to contribute to work projects that are personally meaningful. While both collaborative work and individual opportunity for meaningful work have always been potentially linked, social technology tools that routinize collaboration make personal connection the default option, not the occasional benefit.

We need leaders who can see the Trifecta of Possibility

As promising as they are, social technologies create only the possibility of these interacting opportunities for change. Social technologies still require ‘leadership’ from managers and engaged participation by most members before these opportunities can lead to real change.

Before we can really take advantage of social technologies for liberating us as individuals, organizations and economies, we need to recognize that change at one level requires change at all levels.

Social business advocates who talk about how technology can transform organizations also must address:

• How will these same social technologies create opportunity for individuals?

• When social technologies put pressure on an organization’s relationships with other organizations, how can we use this pressure to transform inter-organizational (economic) relationships?

Leaders must think bigger. They can’t just focus on transforming their particular work organization. Leaders must also have a vision of how the individuals who compose the organization will transform, and how the economic communities these organizations participate in should be transformed.

We’ve talked about how making organizations “social” requires leadership as well as technology. But in fact, what social organizations really require is for people — not just managers but all members — to think bigger about the kinds of changes social technologies can support for us.

Social organizations will thrive has members are freed to become more human, and as stakeholder communities are pressed to become more just.

If we choose to be truly visionary, social technology can drive all three forms of change, so that we all thrive.

Must see also:

If Social Business is the Answer, What is the Question? 3 Driving Forces, by Deb Lavoy at CMSWire.com

Factories: The Original Social Businesses by Anne McEwan, Phd The Smart Work Company

When will “Social Business” Become “Social Change Business”?

Image: WinPlaceShow Some rights reserved by Professor of Death

What does it mean for organizations to become more “social”?

Becoming “social” means that more people across the organization can contribute their ideas and have influence. Why? Because social technologies make it possible for more people to have Voice.

What is Voice?

Voice is having a say with the expectation that you will also be heard. Voice is one of  famous options for individuals who are dissatisfied with governments and organizations.¹ Voice is the only option through which people can be constructive and make a difference.

Along with Exit, Loyalty and Neglect, Voice  is also one of four ways to imagine organization members across the spectrum from ‘engaged’ to ‘disengaged’.²

Organization members who are engaged have Voice. They are able to contribute because their ideas can be heard. Organization members without Voice can only be compliant (loyal) or be disengaged (neglectful). Organization members who don’t have effective Voice and have somewhere to go simply leave (exit).

When Members Lack Voice

If you’ve never worked in non-social organization, you may not realize just how common it is not to have Voice. It’s not only common, it’s awful. Not having Voice means you have no way to speak up, no way to be heard and thus no way to have a positive impact outside your immediate purview. Being without voice means that what you want and what you think can easily be ignored.

Organizational structures like bureaucracies, hierarchies, and silos make broad-scale, effective Voice difficult.

The combination of the power dynamics and the lack of interactive communication up, down and across these organizational boundaries means that people have few options for getting their ideas outside their immediate group. They have no way to connect with others who share their interests, concerns, or sense of purpose,  or to connect with others whose skills or roles enable them to transform an idea into an innovation.

Social Technologies Enable Voice

Social technologies within and across organizations are intentionally designed to cross structural barriers and stakeholder boundaries. And, they are designed with the expectation that users/ employees/ members/ constituents will initiate their own participation.

Social technologies are biased towards Voice and away from silencing.

With social media technologies like SocialCRM, Social Intranets, systems of engagement, digital communities, activity streaming, and social collaboration systems, everyone from employees to customers to interested constituents to fans can find a place to speak and a forum in which they might be heard.

For example, instead of waiting for the corporate retreat to train folks on a new initiative, a member with an idea to contribute to this initiative can comment on a blog post, or start a conversation on the organization’s social intranet. Instead of waiting for an annual performance review, an employee can list the skills she’d like to develop on her online profile, so that the HR folks sponsoring training classes can find her and sign her up. Instead of waiting for the company to upgrade their product and finally include the tool you really want, you can connect with them in customer forums to discuss the specific features you need next.

Social technologies don’t insure that your voice is heard, listened to, and responded to. We all know what it’s like to tweet about a customer service issue and never hear back from the twitter account of the organization responsible for the service failure. But, social media makes it more likely that people’s Voices will be heard, because their participation is located somewhere specific, visible to others, easy to find, and stored for later access.

Influence Without Social Technologies

It used to be that, if you wanted to have Voice in an organization and you didn’t have your own platform (i.e., you were not powerful yourself),  you had to align yourself with someone who was powerful. You had to rely on — really, depend upon — some other person to speak for you. This process for getting your voice represented by someone else only worked occasionally, because that person had his or her own interests to represent, and could easily distort your message (intentionally or not) for their own needs.

With social media, participants get to speak for themselves, in their own words, advancing their own reputations, creating their own relationships throughout the organization’s network.

And, with social technologies, participants get to speak in ways that matter. Voice is not only critical to innovation, collaboration, service, crowdsourcing, and knowledge sharing, but voice is also critical to a sense of contribution, a sense of personal significance, and to the creation of personal meaning.

Voice is not freedom, but …

In organizational networks, the Voice enabled by social technology is not the same as “freedom”. Just because social technologies give us a platform for speaking doesn’t mean we should say what we want, to whom we want, when we want, and in the style we want.

Voice operates within the constraints of context and common courtesy. Words that are irrelevant (e.g., thread hijacking), words that exist only to be mean (e.g., trolling) and words that are tone deaf (e.g., all promotion and no response) are not Voice — they are noise.

Social media doesn’t create Voice, it makes Voice possible. When Voice is possible, influence, contribution and meaning are also possible. With Voice, stakeholders can stay engaged with each other and with the organization in ways that make a positive difference.

See also:
4 Reasons Why Socializing Your Intranet Makes Organizational Change Easier
Are Your Social Business Systems Designed for Extraction or Contribution?
Growing Social: 4 Different Paths to Social Organizations
7 Ways That Social Business Advice is Wrong for Your Organization

Could E2.0 really mean Enlightenment 2.0? by Deb Lavoy
White Paper: Social Intranets and Employee Engagement: An HR Solution for Meaningful Morale Building by ThoughtFarmer

 Re-creating Reputation Through Authentic Interaction: Using Social Media to Connect with Individual Stakeholders (book chapter, by me)

References:
¹ Hirschman, Albert O. (1970). Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
² Farrell, D. (1983). Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect as Responses toJob Dissatisfaction: A Multidimensional Scaling Study. Academy of Management Journal, 26(4), 596-607.
Rusbult, C. E., Farrell, D., Rogers, G., & Mainous III, A. G. (1988). Impact of Exchange Variables on Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect: An integrative model of responses to declining job satisfaction.Academy Of Management Journal, 31(3), 599-627.

Images: Puffing Up Some rights reserved by Property#1, Chirping Carol Some rights reserved by bogenfreund, on Flickr

What’s the best strategy for making your organization more social?

Where do you start to transform your systems, so that you can transform your organization?

Many social media experts suggest that you work from the outside-in.

They encourage organizations to start with one function and one stakeholder group, and ‘get social’ by linking CRM (customer relationship management) systems to the organizational groups involved in customer support.

The smarter way to change is for the organization to get social from the inside-out.

Why? Because comprehensive change requires addressing the core of the organization itself.

The core of your organization’s digital systems is your organization’s intranet.

That’s why we should focus on intranets as we strive to make our organizations more social.

The Intranet as Your Organization’s Digital Core

As traditionally designed, intranets are a combination of portals and repositories, functioning in the background of your day to day activity. Your intranet is where all kinds of ‘managed content’ are located. It’s the place you go for reference materials, bulletins, request forms, employee directories and maybe a white label email system.

If your organization has an intranet you probably use it every day, several times a day, without paying much attention to it. Intranets are “stealth applications”, used regularly but pervasively in the background of your work.

If you work in a smaller organization, you might not have an official intranet. Instead you use an intranet proxy to access the resources of your organization. This proxy might be an external email system (like Outlook or Gmail), a file-sharing & collaboration system (like early Sharepoint) or your organization’s website.

A Common Center that Represents “The Organization”

Whether it’s a formal intranet or an intranet proxy, this place where you start your digital work day provides a common organization-focused center for all members. Thus, intranets should be the starting point for any system of organizational engagement.

Even more important, as the digital starting point of your work, the intranet actually represents your organization to you, and to every other member using it.

Intranets are the digital communications systems that cohere and construct organizations.

I know, intranets are old news. Many intranets are boring, underfunded, decoupled from business strategy, and lacking in tech-sex appeal.

Worse, we take intranets for granted, as the “always there”, “always on”, and nearly invisible.

But, because they are the shared backbone of your organization’s digital communication,

Intranets are the digital social scaffolding of the organization’s structure, processes and culture.

If you want to change your customer relationships and your brands to make them social, by all means start with boundary-crossing systems like CRM and work you way inside to support these changes.

But, if you want a more social organization, one that can support engagement among external and internal stakeholders, then you need to address the structure, processes and culture at your organization’s core.

Go social from the inside-out, and start by socializing your intranet.

See also: Social Intranet Design and Organizational Identity: Design for functionality and character

Images: Tiny Apple and Tiny Apple Core, on Flickr Some rights reserved by me and the sysop

“Social Business” is coming to your organization, whether you’re ready or not.

Social business tools, also known as enterprise social media or systems of engagement, are increasingly being advocated by vendors and consultants as tools that help any organization do its work better.

But, while the influx of social tools could really benefit your organization, the advice about how and why to use social tools could actually prevent your organization from using these tools to their full potential.

That’s because so much of what you’ll hear about why and how to incorporate social business tools into your organization, while well-intentioned, is fundamentally misguided.

7 Ways that Social Business Advice is Misguided

1. It’s Technology-driven

Misguided social business advice is driven by the availability of bright shiny new enterprise social media technology.

Wise social business advice is purpose-driven. It aims to tap into the pent-up desire of organizations, members, and stakeholders for deeper, richer and more authentic communication, communication that helps them achieve their collective purpose.

2. It’s Customer-centric

Misguided social business advice is driven by a focus on customers and customers’ needs. Employees and organizations either excluded, treated as afterthoughts, or seen as means to an end.

Wise social business advice is people-centric. It puts the organization and its members first, understanding that the organization and the people within it are the engines of authentic change and the source of true value.

3. It’s Reactionary

Misguided social business advice is reactionary. It takes the “Oh crap, here it comes, might as well figure out how to fit it in” approach.

Wise social business advice is visionary. It is energized by a vision of what the organization and its stakeholder system could be like, if authentic communication was fostered and supported.

4. It Extolls Efficiency

Misguided social business advice urges us to automate and digitize whatever we can that might make work more efficient.

It puts new digital architecture on top of old digital architecture. It tries to separate content from process, as though process were content-agnostic.

Wise social business advice has a generative orientation. It has a creative flavor.

Wise social business advice starts with the questions like: “What more can we contribute together, to each other?
What tools can we use to foster and support these contributions”?

Wise social media advice helps organizations flourish, by focusing on how to support the personal, interpersonal and collective systems that create value.

5. Adoption is driven by Vendors

Misguided social business advice is driven by vendors who want to sell more tools, more systems, more consulting, and more stuff. It preys on organizations’ fears that they must have the latest stuff in order to be competitive.

Wise social business advice takes the perspective of makers, right inside your organization. It begins by recognizing what we already have that’s working, what we already have that we value, what we already have that we can tweak. It helps us figure out what we really ‘need’ to support our collective purpose.

6. It’s Obsessed with Numbers

Misguided social business advice is obsessed with numbers. It is driven by the logic of ROI. It takes an investment-return, input-output approach to (over-)emphasize just a small part of what social media systems can do for us. Misguided social business advice tells us to count, to compete and to keep score.

Wise social business advice is driven by the logic of quality, by the search for real value. It invites us to make qualitative adjustments, to recognize the role of aesthetics, to appreciate emotion, to help experience working relationships as sources of delight, insight, joy, and fun.

Wise social business advice helps us use these tools to be more human, more “community“.

7. It’s All ‘Business’

Misguided social business advice intends to help you run a business, make stuff, deliver a service.

Wise social business advice intends to nurture and sustain a flourishing organizational eco-system. It seeks to to help you build capacity in your organization, your members, and your stakeholders individually and as a system.

Well-intentioned and Misguided

There are many folks with great enthusiasm about social tools and great intentions about helping organizations.  Lots of their advice is useful, but very little of it is comprehensive, truly visionary, or deeply inspiring. It’s too much about ‘business as usual’. It’s not enough about ‘organizations as they could be’.

It’s not wise to focus on Social Business. Instead, focus on Social Organizations to really make a difference.

Misguided social business advice has got a lot of things bass-ackward. It treats the organization as a fresh site for selling new technologies, and organizational change strategies only matter because they’ll help us implement technology more efficiently.

Wise social business advice, in contrast, understands that social technology, systems, and tools matter only because they have the potential for enabling our collective purpose.

I’ve been composing a list of sources for wise social media advice, so if you have any links, blogs, or tweeters to recommend, please let me know. I’ll post the list in a few weeks.

See also:

Systems of Engagement: Technology for Social Organizations
Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
Social Organizations and IT Leadership: Resources

Note: The posts hyperlinked above are absolutely not intended as examples of misguided advice. They’re there for context, definitions, further ideas for you, etc.

Images: Graffiti showing frown on…from Horia Varlan
rhythm and blues from iboy_daniel
blue green glass abstract from Brent 2.0

Why do we really need to log in to websites we use all the time?

Why do those logins really matter, to us personally?

Logins matter for three reasons– two that are predictable, and one that’s rather surprising.

1. Website logins improve the targeting of the site itself, in ways that benefit the organization.

Logins allow sites and the businesses/groups behind them to track who’s there and why, making it possible for them to focus content, personalize offers, offer visit-specific support, solicit feedback, invite you return, close sales, and more.

2. Website logins improve the targeting of the site in ways that have have some secondary benefit to us as customers.

I get some convenience, additional security, increased functionality, and more, that might be valuable to me in my relationship to that particular website.

But in the end, is there anything about a login that really benefits us, as people?

Well, yes, actually.

Website logins help to create the feeling that we belong.

That we matter. That we’ve made it past the rope. That we are somehow special.

Isn’t that weird?

When we login to websites, we get the experience of knocking on the door, being recognized, and having the door opened so that we can enter.

Of course, to trigger a feeling of recognition and welcome, the login must be well-designed.

There is nothing more frustrating, or easier for creating resentment, than the unkind routines some websites put you through when you forget or (gasp) mistype your password.

(I find this particularly annoying, since I am a handicapped typist and struggle even with typing my own name accurately. That’s why I love the funny note on one of my iPhone apps that blames the tiny smartphone keys if a password is incorrect.)

Because the login is such a simple step, and the responses so routinized, it’s also quite easy to design the experience to be warm and welcoming. Thus, it’s quite easy to garner some subtle but positive vibes for your site- and for your organization.

Why think about website logins and sense of membership?

What made me think about the psychology of logins was not only Chris Tuttle’s post about Nonprofit Engagement: Why Website Logins Matter, but also my recent road trip up i-95.

There’s one state where the EZPass lanes are marked “Members Only”. This always makes me laugh (really, who thinks of herself as a ‘member’ of EZPass?). Also, though, I recognize that this makes me, an EZPass ‘member’ feel special.

Go figure.

The outcomes may be subtle, and the dynamics may seem silly at the surface, but remember–

It’s the little, micro-interactions–  like the website login — that can make the first positive emotional impression on your visitors.

Make us feel welcomed.

Make us feel special.

Treat us as members.

It’s super subtle psychology you can use to your advantage and to the advantage of the mutual project that we engage in on your site, together.

Use Extreme Leverage 2.0 to Change The Social World
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

Image: Toll Booth by JacobEnos Some rights reserved

It’s easy to see how Employer Branding is useful to HR departments and potential job applicants.

Employer Branding, the practice of marketing images of your organization as a desirable place to work towards potential job applicants, is a sensible strategy for attracting the right people onto your bus (-iness).

Employer Branding works to draw to an organization the kind of people the organization wants to hire, by making the organization look like it has specific, compelling, desirable characteristics.

Promoting an idealized or crystallized view of “what it’s like to work here”, organizations and their HR departments hope to increase applicants, reduce recruiting inefficiencies, improve yield, and keep employees longer, all because these new employees experience improved person-organization /employee-employer fit.

Sounds good for HR, sounds good for potential employees.

And, although it is designed to attract future employees, Employee Branding also has a few benefits for current employees.

3 Ways Employer Branding Can Benefit Current Employees

l. The Employer Brand may bring new insight to key managers.

An Employer Branding campaign requires someone in the organization to spend time thinking about “what it’s like to work here” from the employees’ point of view.

Taking the employees’ perspective (however briefly and instrumentally) may give managers and HR departments new insights about the everyday experiences of organization members. These new insights might inspire managers to systematize, reinforce or change the environment at work to make the environment more attractive.

2. The Employer Brand may trigger sense-making and action by current employees.

The messages of an Employee Branding campaign are seen not only by outside, potential employees but also by inside, current employees.

An Employer Branding campaign can create an opportunity for people in the organization to talk with each other about what their organization is like as an employer. Conversations about the Employer Brand might address questions like ” Is this what its like to work here?” and “How can we work together to make this environment more like that idealized picture?”

An uptick in awareness, the invitation to consider the Employer Brand, and the opportunity to talk about it together might lead employees to reinforce and/or improve the organizational environment themselves.

3. The Employer Brand can improve the contributions of new employees to the experience of current employees.

The Employer Brand can help draw the ‘right kind’ of coworkers into the organization, reinforcing the desirable elements of the work environment and helping to fulfill the promise of ‘the brand’ for current and new employees alike.

Of course, the Employer Brand can only have these positive effects if it is somewhat true and reasonably credible. An Employer Brand made up of unreal claims, however desirable these claims may be, would only create disappointment and resentment among current employees.

An Employer Branding campaign can help a current employee these three ways, as long as the current employee has a good personal fit with the desired, projected Employer Brand.

Bonus Benefit if you don’t fit

And for the employee who doesn’t fit the work context of this projected Employer Brand?

There’s still a positive influence. The Employer Branding campaign may help that current employee realize that this organization really *isn’t* a good fit, and inspire the employee to look for a different employer, an organization that has a better fit with his or her own values and needs.

See also:

Images:
GoodFitting When Fastened, and CloseUp Some rights reserved by Lee Turner on Flickr

Traditionally, extreme leverage is something organizations worked hard to avoid.   Now, in the social media landscape,  ”Extreme Leverage 2.0″ is something that evey organization should embrace.

Why? Because Extreme Leverage 2.0 allows a few people, in relatively small businesses, to change the world for their stakeholders.

Understanding Extreme Leverage 2.0

In the world of corporate finance, extreme leverage often hampers your organization’s effectiveness. You’re up to your ears in debt, having borrowed to your limit, and organizational life is pressured and often miserable. It’s win or lose for you. To make matters worse,  your debt/equity ratio scares the crap out of anyone who might be interested in working with you.

In the 2.0 world, Extreme Leverage is completely different.

With Extreme leverage 2.0, your organization has the ability to influence the experience of hundreds, even millions of stakeholders, even when your organization is small enough that you might all fit in one conference room. The combination of your user/employee ratio and your effort/influence ratio give you tremendous reach and tremendous opportunity to shape people’s social behavior. Together, these two components of Extreme Leverage 2.0 make it possible for a few people, in relatively small companies, to change the world.

User/Employee Ratio

I first thought of the idea of Extreme Leverage 2.0 when I saw this post about internet companies with few employees but millions of users. I was struck by ratio of users (or stakeholders) to employees (or members) at these very well-known and influential social media companies. (Thanks to Royal Pingdom for the numbers.) For example,

Take Mozilla: 400 million downloads / 250 employees
Or Twitter: 175 million users / 300 employees
Or Tumbler: 12 million users / 18 employees

It’s mind-boggling when you think about the ratio between the number of people who use the organization’s product to the number of people who make the product being ‘a million to one’, or ‘two million to one’. In each of these organizations, one person’s contribution to the product can structure the experience of an astronomical number of users.

Effort/Influence Ratio

The effort/influence ratio is the relationship between the amount of effort an employee or member has to put into a decision and the amount of social change that this decision might produce. In companies with Extreme Leverage 2.0, decisions that members make about very basic features of their product have broad and even deep ramifications for the experiences of their huge number of users. The effort/influence ratio is a specific case of the “butterfly effect”, where a small difference in an intitial condition ends up producing big changes in a system.

What’s distinctive about Extreme Leverage 2.0 is that the effort/influence ratio is appreciated and used as a way to deliberately create a shift in users’ relationships with each other, with the organization, with society, or with their selves, that liberates them.

The 2.0 -ness of Extreme Leverage

I’m calling this kind of leverage “2.0″ because this leverage is easily available to any organization that uses social media inside and/or across their organization’s boundaries. Certainly, the mechanics and economics of building social media platforms & tools make this industry extremely leveraged by design — it only takes so many people to build and run a platform, and once built, it doesn’t take a huge influx of new employees to scale up to large numbers of users.

Still, organizations in other industries can also take advantage of extreme leverage 2.0, when they choose their social media tools and strategies. As I’ve written before, the ways that  interactions are scripted into the software itself can shape the relationships between the organization and the stakeholder. (For example, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is a well-extablished approach to build-in social change through software design, that takes advantage of extreme leverage 2.0.)

The 2.0 -ness of this social change influence goes beyond using social media tools to organize and lead people to social change action. It goes beyond using processes and software born from an ethically-motivated, gift-culture oriented ethos, as with Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS).

Instead, the social change influence comes from building social changes into the product itself.

Examples of Extreme Leverage 2.0

Let me give you two specific examples of subtle social change that takes advantage of Extreme Leverage 2.0.

Hashable

Hashable, a networking app that helps users introduce people to each other, has about 14 employees and over 10,000+ users (as of Jan. ’11).

Recently, Hashable made a subtle and significant change to the wording of the automatic message that’s part of a Hashable introduction.

As SXSW Hashable Evangelist Natalia Oberti Noguera explains:

Hashable has made me feel that they genuinely care about my feedback, even integrating a #languagematters suggestion I made regarding their automated copy. Emily (Hickey) et al changed the standard language in an email intro via their website from “Hi Guys” to “Hi there.” A small change with a big impact.

Now, with every single introduction made through Hashable, users receive a gender-neutral welcome. That gender-neutral welcome recognizes us all equally.

Diaspora

The second example comes from Diaspora, the open source alternative to facebook. Diaspora has 107 contributors, and thousands of beta users.

One Diaspora contributor, Sarah Mei (a Ruby on Rails software developer), decided to structure the “gender” field of the individual’s profile in a way that was, intentionally, liberatory.

As Sarah Mei describes in her Nov 2011 post, Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora”

The “gender” field in a person’s profile was originally a dropdown menu, with three choices: blank, male, and female.

My change made it an optional text field that was blank to start. A wide open frontier! Enter anything you want.

One person’s thoughtful consideration of a foundational element of a social network, and her subsequent contribution to software & product design, has now made it possible for millions of future users to describe their gender any way they choose. Take that, binary thinking!

And, of course, there is the change that Facebook made back in February, now allowing people to indicate their relationship status as “in a civil union” and “in a domestic partnership.” Facebook seems like a huge company, but with 400 million users and only 1,200 employees, Facebook certainly has Extreme Leverage 2.0.

Each of these changes is very small, in terms of the work was actually required to change the product. But these changes, to the user, are anything but small. From gender neutral language, to self-description, to relationship recognition, these changes all make it possible for users to present ourselves as we see ourselves, and for users to be in charge of our own identity. They give authority for self-definition to us. It may seem almost negligible, but these changes are powerful.

By creating freedom in the very way we present ourselves, these changes create a foundation for authentic personal meaning, and for authentic interaction.

The Challenge and Opportunity of Extreme Leverage 2.0

What’s neat about this whole idea of extreme leverage is the way that it can be used by inspired, visionary, progressive and persuasive employees, organization members, or stakeholders to make a difference in our social world. Each one of the changes, above, required just one or a small number of organization members to identify and understand that a particular design choice could have an important social impact, and to consider what they wanted that impact to be. These changes just required a few lines of code to create. There’s the opportunity of Extreme Leverage 2.0.

And the challenge? The challenge is for organizations and members to decide to be deliberate and thoughtful about the larger social impact of their product design decisions.

Social media platforms and the code that supports them reflect the political & social values of the developers, the product managers, the entrepreneurs, and even the investors involved in the product.  Often these choices are treated as though they are only about ‘what the product does’ or ‘what’s most efficient’. Basic decisions just replicate taken-for-granted assumptions about how things already are. But, stepping back to consider the larger ramifications of product choices invites these same developers, product managers, entrepreneurs, and investors to be conscious of what else their product could do.

Why should you care about Extreme Leverage 2.0:

Let me borrow Sarah Mei’s explanation to suggest why Extreme Leverage 2.0 matters. She writes:

I made this change to Diaspora so that I won’t alienate anyone I love before they finish signing up.

I made this change because gender is a beautiful and multifaceted thing that can’t be contained by a list.

I know a lot of people aren’t there with me yet. So I also made this change to give them one momentary chance to consider other possibilities.

Extreme Leverage 2.0 challenges us and offers us the opportunity, as organizations and as individual workers, to use our extreme influence to do good.

Let’s use the idea of Extreme Leverage 2.0 to remind us that as we create products, we should give ourselves the chance to consider other possibilities. Then, we should build these possibilities into our products, and change the social world.

See also:
“Gender is a Text Field” (Diaspora, backstory, and context) by Sarah Dopp
Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
How Social Media Creates Organizational Meaning
When Will “Social Business” Become Social Change Business?

Thanks to Jon Pincus (@jdp23) for introducing me to Diaspora, and for sustaining the conversation about software design and social change.

Social Media helps us get work done. And, Social Media has a unique ability to show us something about how we get work done that we often overlook. It allows us to see both conventional work and “invisible work”.

What is invisible work?

Invisible work includes all kinds of energy and tasks that contribute to achieving organizational goals but that happen offstage, are done by people who we don’t pay attention to, or aren’t recognized as ‘work’.

When work is invisible, we don’t see how it contributes to results, how much effort it takes to perform, or how much skill it takes to do this invisible work well. We fail to appreciate what this invisible work contributes, and we fail to value it. And yet, without this invisible work, the effort behind it, and the people who perform it, we’d be hard-pressed to achieve much at all.

Social Media Reveals Relational Work

One of the most common forms of invisible work is ‘relational work‘ — all that effort we put into creating, sustaining and transforming relationships. This social, psychological, interpersonal, and emotional work is critical to our ability to contribute to the bottom line in an organization.

[Consider how, when it comes to performance reviews, we're rarely able to provide examples of this kind of work. We have examples of “concrete” task-y work that we've got done–wire frames, spreadsheets, sales calls–but we are less able to show a track record of the invisible work that made this other work possible.]

Now that social media — tools like Twitter, Yammer, SocialCast, Hashable– lets us see and track interactions between people, we can also see what’s going on in these relationships. These tools show us when a person is reaching out to someone, making introductions, recognizing others, affirming them, and more.

Social Media shows us not only who is connecting with whom, but also what they’re sending across that connection. We can see if people are sharing links, offering suggestions, making introductions, or offering positive words.

Beyond basic relationship-building actions, we can see people engaging in the absolute best and most difficult kinds of relational work. We can see them creating work relationships that foster the growth of the individuals in the relationship, the growth of the relational network, and the flourishing of the organization itself.

Relational Work Takes Effort and Skill

Growth-oriented relationships require real skill to build and to maintain. With social media, we can watch as people demonstrate skills like listening closely, acknowledging vulnerability, experiencing and expressing emotion, participating in the development of another, and managing mutual expectations.

Social Media brings into the light the invisible work that goes into nurturing, supporting, encouraging and facilitating the behavior of others.

Once we see this relational work, we can begin

• To see the value of this work,
• To see those who do so this work, and
• To value those who do this work.

Even better, we can learn from the people who contribute relational work to make our own work relationships stronger, more productive and more generative.

Social media itself doesn’t build relationships; we do. However, social media builds our ability to appreciate relationships and the skill the require.

Social Media helps us see the amount, the qualities, and the source of strong relationships, helping us value the work and the people who do it.

See also:

• Be Your Own Hashtag
• How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
• Is your organization flourishing or withering?

Images: Invisible from Daniel*1977, Je suis toujours invisible from Perfesser

References:
Daniels, A. K. (1987) Invisible Work, Social Problems, 34 (5).
Fletcher, J. (1999) Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work. The MIT Press.

Social media tools can transform an organization.

One of the things I enjoy so much about social media is the chance to be (more often) the person I am, with my specific sets of talents, interests, and goals. Every time I extend myself out on social media, I get to choose what I’ll say, how I’ll represent an idea, and how I’ll demonstrate what that idea means to me.

The same is true for organizations. Each time an organization reaches out to share a message, it is aiming to create an impression on its audience(s) that conveys a sense of who that organization is and what it cares about. Each message creates meaning.

Historically, this reaching out, this extension of the organizational ‘self by creating meaning,’ happened in one of three ways:

1. formal corporate communication,
2. advertising (either for products or for corporate), and
3. CEO presentations (e.g., interviews, speeches).

All of these efforts involve managing the corporate, collective self into a single, intentional voice– keeping the meaning as tight and limited as possible. The message was (and is still) almost always massaged, shaped, intentional, deliberate, goal-oriented.

What makes social media so interesting as a tool for creating meaning about an organization and within an organization is that:

1.) Social Media messages often bypasses the ‘professional massage’ step, and
2.) Social Media messages come from many places, many individual and many interactions instead of one central source.

When communication bypasses the sausage machine, it can create meaning that evades centralized, controlled boundaries. It can be ‘off message’ and offer a very different meaning, it can be ‘on message’ and be more complex than the typical extruded meaning, and it can be somewhere in between, fleshing out and filling in our understanding of what that organization is all about.

Because social media communications come not only from ‘corporate’ or ‘marcomms’ efforts but also from online representatives, brandividuals, and a motley assortment of folks connected to the organization, all these additional, little bits of communication offer an alternative form of data for understanding the organization.

Instead of a massaged, managed, deliberate stream, social media give us many local, specific, situational, personalized messages about the organization.

While it’s true that sometimes the meaning conveyed in these messages just reinforces the centrally-managed meaning, a lot of these messages create new meaning.

New meaning gets created when individuals speak about something specific, on behalf of the organization.

When individuals are speaking on behalf of their organization to some interested person, that individual faces a unique challenge. S/he has to take the general, global, abstract, big picture message of the organization and translate it into the specific context. S/he has to understand the organization and s/he has to put that understanding into her or his own words. Her own words convey new meaning.

The organization member her or himself has to craft specific meaning out of a general understanding. In that moment of crafting, at that point of articulating, the individual has to put new words together in new ways to represent the organization’s point of view.

At that moment, in this unique communication, the individual creates new meaning about and for the organization.

One source of new meaning is how the individual translates an abstract organizational position into a specific statement. Another critical source of new meaning is that the individual contributes her or his own knowledge — local knowledge, from her or his direct engagement in the organization — into that message. That local, personal knowledge is almost always new information, and in this way the real experience of that individual member creates new meaning for the organization.

In the process of creating new meaning, the new meaning also accrues some additional heft. Not only does the new meaning get created, but also it gets ‘owned’. The person who said it owns it, and now has to stand behind it. S/he may called upon to repeat this message, to elaborate on its meaning or even to demonstrate it in her next interaction with that audience. Thus, the new meaning has legitimacy, some authority, and more than a little bit of authenticity.

Here on this blog, writing about the dynamics of social media, new meaning creation, and how it engages organizational identity and reputation challenges me the same way that writing ‘about’ Zappos culture on Twitter challenges the average Zappos employee.

We both have to take a big picture message, and convey a big picture intent, in specific communication acts. We have to understand, translate, embellish, exemplify, recreate, rewrite, from general to specific. We have to create new meaning each time, in each blog post and each tweet.

And so it is with each of us who, through social media, puts into words and into interactions the values, the attributes, the goals, the meaning of what we are part of, who we are speaking for, and what we are speaking about.

We’re not just making it up as we go along; we’re making new meaning as we talk together.

See also:

Be Your Own Hashtag
Tweet Yourself Like the Person You Want to Be
The Best PR that $1.6 Million Can’t Buy: Authenticity in Action at Zappos
Why We Want Brandividuals on Social Media

Image: Solidarity….. misconceptions by Super is Sunny

[One of the special joys of blogging and tweeting about progressive movements in organizations and leadership is the relationships we make as we find kindred souls. These kindred souls are often tucked into niches other than our own, but because their approaches share the our fundamental values and because they are working with a shared purpose, we discover them as allies and friends.

Fran Melmed, who writes the blog free-range [communication], is one of those kindred souls. In one of our econversations about work+life+meaning, striving to be authentic to our full selves, and making a difference in the world, Fran offered to put pen to paper to try and capture that acute set of contradictions. I’m delighted to share it with you all as a guest post from Fran.]

The Stress of Not Having It All

Welcome to my confessional: I’m feeling the stress of not having it all.

What should be amusing about this is that I don’t even believe in the notion of having it all. But let me tell you, I’m not amused. I know that I don’t have it. And I want it.

A little background

About two years ago, my kids hit their tweens and were no longer the suction cups they once were. At the same time, I began hitting my stride in my chosen line of work: helping companies better engage their employees and their families in healthier living. Should be cause for celebration, right? Wahoo! My kids are growing up; they don’t need me. Away I go, soaring ever higher into the never-never land of wondrous, satisfying work.

Not so fast. Many moons ago, I made the personal decision to contain my career while I had kids in the house. (It’s based on my emotional baggage, to be sure, so don’t take this as my way of saying my choice is the choice.) When I became a mother while working at Hewitt, I worked part-time and then full-time, but flextime. When I left Hewitt, I started my own company to maintain, if not expand, the work-life balance Hewitt so generously supported.

I’m ready. Depression.*

And it’s wonderful. I have all that I want…except. Except for the ambitious, competitive and adventurous career side of me that aspires to growing my independent consulting firm tenfold. To implanting myself on the speaker circuit. Or taking that tantalizing mega-job at a start-up that’s nailing health engagement. Of my own choosing, these exciting paths beckon but are barred. I can’t have it all.

And so I feel like a part of me is untended and underdeveloped. I feel torn and stressed. And sometimes angry. After speaking with several friends, I realized I’m not alone. Our backgrounds and our choices may differ, as does what we’re missing or pining for. But to a person, we all felt the frustration of not having it all.

A false choice

Generally speaking, the notion of having it all is something women have embraced because for too long we couldn’t even have what we wanted, let alone it all. Perhaps, initially, having it all meant having the right to choose, as would have benefited my mother, who was told by her father that he’d financially support only nursing or education studies—studies suitable for a woman destined for marriage. With time, having it all became the Holy Grail, and just as elusive and mystical.

I think it’s time women recognize that we’re never going to have it all. We’re not going to have it all if we do fewer dishes. We’re not going to have it all when men wipe more babies’ bottoms than we do. And we’re not going to have it all when we storm the C-suite, like they stormed the Bastille, and rout the place.

I think it’s time men recognize that they, too, are never going to have it all. Not when a man pushing a baby in a swing at the neighborhood playground gathers no accolades. Not when more companies “man up” and supply paternity leave, either.

None of us—men or women—are going to have it all. Because we can’t. The entire concept is a farce—a snow job.

Is it the terminology or the elusiveness?

Every one of us has to make decisions that deny us elsewhere. Sometimes we’re forced to. Sometimes we choose to. Every one of us longs to have it all. Most of us know that it’s an impossibility. So, why does having it all have such a stranglehold on our consciousness?

Since communication is what I do, I can’t help but examine whether it’s the terminology. Are we stressed by the choice of words: “have it all”? Does our continued use of the phrase lead us to believe it is, in fact, possible and we’re the only ones who haven’t cracked the code? Or is the allure of having it all so strong that it blinds our reasoning?

And because employee health is what I encourage, I have to ask how not having it all plays into our work performance, our feelings of engagement and our health?

I’m left with more questions than answers.

Notes:
* If you saw The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, this phrase needs no explanation. If not, watch this.
You might also enjoy this post by Fran: no predictions, no resolutions. only courage.
See also: Work-Life Initiatives Are the Foundation of Authentic Organizations

Images: Blue + green from dichohecho , photo11_7A – Green + Blue from dichohecho, Green and blue from Raoul Pop